Werewolves and Chocolate
by slybunny
Summary: Werewolves and chocolate don't go in the same sentence. So why is that statement contradicted in this very paragraph?


Remus wasn't sure when it all began.

He wasn't even aware of the presence of chocolate until his first meal at Hogwarts. He hadn't eaten much even though the food was so aromatic and just _so good_ , until he noticed Peter gleefully devouring something like a muffin with sprinkles. His face was covered in streaks of brown, and if Remus had no common sense he would've mistaken it for something that ought to stay in the toilet. He would've tried a cupcake too, had Peter not taken the last of the ten cupcakes he'd already eaten. Between the empty plate and Remus were squares of coppery brown. Seeing Peter already begin eying the plate as if he were planning how to conquer it, Remus hastily snatched a cube out of the boy's range and cautiously took a small bite of it.

The first thought he had was _is there chocolate in heaven?_ It was so _perfect_ and _gooey_ and _soft_ and oh, how Remus would've eaten the whole lot if only he had taken a few more before the plate lost all its contents. Later, he learned that the cubes were a form of chocolate dessert called a "brownie". It was a very original name for something brown, but Remus had nothing against brownies except for the very clever title the owner had christened it.

After brownies came chocolate chip cookies, the warm cocoa still melting in the mouth just fresh out of the oven. Then, there was peppermint bark in the winter holidays- not too much peppermint extract and not too sweet either. Chocolate wormed its way into Remus' letters home. His mother replied that he was making her hungry just by his description and reminded him to brush his teeth after eating sweets.

In third year, Remus found bars of chocolate in Honeydukes'. Sirius laughed at the awe in his face as he stared at a humongous bar of chocolate weighing almost as much as Remus and bearing a description involving many synonyms for the word "delicious". After Remus had been convinced to stay following a bluntly stated question- "Are you a werewolf?"- Remus came back exhausted from a particularly violent full moon and was startled to see the giant chocolate bar where his bed was. Actually, it was leaning against and therefore covered his view of the four-poster, but his mind couldn't process that at that moment. His roommates had also forgotten that chocolate had the capability to melt, so when Remus ran a hand over the smooth foil it felt anything but solid.

He ate it anyway. Or drank it, if you wanted to be technical about things.

Remus' friends also began noticing his growing obsession with chocolate. After Remus yelled at Peter for the fifth time for taking the whole lot of truffles with his dirty, chubby hands ("you could've at least used chopsticks or something!"), Sirius and James wrote a new sentence in the Marauders' Code, just below " _Never tease Prongs about his inexistent love life"_.

"Never eat Moony's truffles. How's that?"

The two were conversing in low tones in the dormitory after Peter had fled the tower with Remus in hot pursuit. The scroll of parchment was open and flattened on Sirius' bed, and the boy's quill was hovering at the end of the unfinished document.

"The box actually belonged to me, I think. I bought this one."

"But if you're thinking gift-wise, it's really _ours_ , because it's meant to be consumed by all of us."

"You can't say that each truffle belongs to four people, right?" Sirius grinned maddeningly. "And if there's an odd amount of chocolate in the box..."

They quickly counted. James ran a hand through his hair, frustrated. "Why do they have to come up with these specific numbers? Why couldn't it have been 'around twenty' instead of twenty-two?"

"No, it's not twenty-two." Sirius paused. "It's twenty-three."

"That's even worse!" the messy-haired boy moaned. "You can't expect to split evenly among people-"

"-unless you had half a person."

James stared at Sirius. "You mean half a truffle. We could cut it in half."

"Who wants half a truffle?" Sirius scoffed. "If I gave you half of a photograph with you kissing someone who's not in that half, how would you know if it was Evans or Snape?"

"I would know, I think," James said dryly. "Both situations would be very vivid memories. But I think I get your point."

"I mean, when you make chocolate chip cookies there's not always the same amount of chocolate on each side, right? I think there was once where an entire half of the cookie was just dough."

James laid down. "Moony hated Peter for giving him that half."

"Not that Wormtail would've noticed, anyway. Doesn't anybody know that you can split it the _other_ way?"

"And what way would that be, pray tell?" James asked sarcastically. "At what angle?"

"Three hundred sixty, maybe? At any rate, I think we wouldn't really do with sharing equally amongst ourselves. There's health to consider."

"If you count dessert as being healthy, then go ahead."

"Right. Who's the fat one of us?" Sirius pretended to think.

"You don't need to ask. Peter's going to have to exhibit self-control; he eats three times as much as Moony-"

"-who's the skinniest of us lot." He reached over and poked James' stomach. "I think you should've eaten one less strand of spaghetti yesterday."

James poked him back. "Coming from you! You don't even play Quidditch."

"Yet," Sirius added.

"Oh, please," the boy scoffed. "You're not going to be on the team even after Mendel graduates. McGonagall will personally kick you off the position before you even get it."

Sirius folded his arms. "It's not my fault McLaggen was standing in the way!"

There was a pause. "True, that. Let's get back on topic," he said. "I think we should just let Moony eat as much as he wants and then leave the rest to us. We'll squabble over it."

"I used to think Remus would insist on still doling out equal portions, but now I'm not too sure. I feel like he could eat the whole box at this rate."

"And it's not just truffles," James agreed. "What about 'Never eat Moony's chocolate'?"

"Rather general, isn't it? What if there was even just a _hint_ of chocolate in, let's say, the salad?"

"Eurgh. Chocolate lettuce? No thanks."

"If you think about it, cocoa comes from a plant..."

They were still in a heated argument when Remus came back from a refreshing chase across the castle. He thought that Peter must have been that scared to have the adrenaline to run so fast on his short legs. But the rat deserved it, he thought vindictively. All he ever thought about was his stomach. Remus cheerfully said the password and entered the common room. He walked up the stairs and to the dormitory.

"There is no way you're getting me to eat that-"

"Oh yeah? What about chocolate-covered chicken?"

Remus entered the room with an odd look at the person who had just uttered the last sentence. He sat down on his bed with a complacent expression, clasped his hands together on his lap, and did absolutely nothing. The two black-haired boys glanced at each other uneasily, then back at the serene boy.

"Uh, Remus? Where's Peter?"

"Getting me chocolate from the kitchens," Remus said calmly. "If he so much as eats the frosting he's going to get a worse punishment."

Sirius looked at him with concern for his sanity. "You okay, mate?"

"Top notch." Remus beamed. "Peter should be back in... let's see... just about now," he said just as a floating mountain of chocolate entered the room.

Sirius stared at it. "What did you turn Wormtail into? A slave?"

* * *

Soon, the occupants of the fourth-year boys' dormitory had had enough. They'd come to an unanimous agreement that Remus Lupin was becoming mental and ought to have made an appointment with Saint Mungo's ages ago. It was made worse by the fact that Remus apparently had absolutely no idea of his appalling behavior.

"You are on chocolate time-out," Sirius declared one evening, dragging a chair to a corner of the room. When Remus looked at him with an expression suggesting that this was simply one of Sirius' weird proclamations and did not budge an inch, Sirius made his meaning clearer. "Go sit over there," he said sternly.

"Who are you, Professor McGonagall?" But Remus stood up and started toward the corner anyway, calmly anticipating whatever Sirius had in mind.

"Where are you going?"

Remus was not amused by now. "You told me to sit in that chair in the corner and now you're asking me what I'm doing?"

"No, I mean-" Sirius cut off exasperatedly. "What's the point of sitting in time-out when you still have that bar of chocolate you're holding?"

The boy looked down at his hands, looking mildly surprised to see it there. "I thought I was going to save that for later."

"Exactly! I think you're addicted to chocolate, Moony. So give it to me and go sit down in that chair." Sirius held out his hand.

"A chocolate addiction?" Remus laughed. "That's absurd. James, Peter, you agree with me, right?" James looked stoically back at him. Peter was trying not to burst out. Smiling, Remus placed the chocolate in Sirius' waiting hand and retreated to the lone chair in the corner.

"Really, Sirius? Of all the Muggle things you had to look up, you chose a _time-out_?" James hissed.

Sirius said defensively, "I didn't have a ruler, okay?"

But even with all the absurd effects chocolate had on Remus Lupin, nobody would have imagined that chocolate would be the death of him. After all, his friends couldn't stick to him at every waking moment like Spellotape, and certainly not when he transformed or moved out. Even if Sirius was his closest friend, Remus couldn't imagine him risking the castle-full of swooning girls (no matter he never noticed them) in order to keep Remus safe from himself. And so on that fateful morning when he was told of a certain fifth-year Slytherin boy, he couldn't stand it anymore.

From books and the _Daily Prophet_ , depression and binge-eating was something Remus had never imagined doing, but somehow he found the urge to eat chocolate as comfort, at first from his bedside table, and then at odd times throughout the day after he was discharged from the Hospital Wing. For some reason, chocolate reminded him of Sirius- the Sirius as he knew it, before he spilled the beans to Snape. Sirius, the warm friend. Sirius, the white sheep of the Black family. Sirius, the loyal one who would lick Remus with his slobbery dog tongue while the poor boy was practically immobile under the bedsheets in the hospital. And James- James, who risked his reputation to bring Remus notes from the classes they had together, who brought cups of hot chocolate up to the dormitory as a treat for all four of them (it was actually three. Everything was fine until he somehow ticked off Lily _again_ and suffered a first-degree burn). It even reminded Remus of Peter, that rat. If Peter had not had poor resistance to dessert, Remus wouldn't have had the heart to run around the castle for no reason. It had made exercising fun, loathe as he was to admit it.

Of course, he knew chocolate was poisonous to wolves. Maybe that was why he started eating a lot of it after Sirius and Remus had stopped talking. Sirius wasn't there anymore to stop Remus from breaking off a square of chocolate. James and Peter left him alone well enough, though. They knew Remus didn't need nagging about something so petty, when it was compared to That Incident.

Except it wasn't. It never was. Remus had always known he was going to be turned away, mostly rudely, from any job. But he'd had his friends to depend upon, and now he wasn't so sure anymore. And if Remus couldn't get a job, he couldn't move out, and his parents were suffering enough as it is. And so Remus realized through his memories of Sirius through consummation of chocolate, that it was an accident. And so he decided to do what was right.

Nobody knew what he was planning until one dawn after the full moon when Madam Pomfrey uttered, "Mr. Lupin may have had food poisoning."

The three boys were gathered around Remus' bed. Sirius had paused in the middle of fidgeting with the bedsheets and James had a look on his face that suggested that Madam Pomfrey was joking. And Peter had no idea why Pomfrey was so serious. After all, he wasn't choosy about food and had never experienced the feeling of his body rejecting food.

"How could he have eaten anything?" James asked confusedly. "I thought animals couldn't get in the Shack."

"Oh no, it wasn't meat." She drew out a mangled mess of something brown, shiny foil peeking out in places. "It was chocolate."

There was a stunned silence as the boys tried to figure out why a werewolf would be eating chocolate, but also why there was chocolate in the Shrieking Shack in the first place. Finally, Sirius pieced the puzzle together, and his face paled. "Oh Merlin. Chocolate is _poisonous_ to wolves!"

James was still befuddled. "Why would Remus eat chocolate though? Even if someone wanted to kill him, his sense of smell should tell him to stay away. Or at least it shouldn't be recognized as food."

"And that's where I think he became confused. This is a ridiculous theory, but does-" Madam Pomfrey hesitated. "Does Remus like chocolate?"

Sirius snorted. "Like is an understatement. I think he would marry chocolate if he wasn't so inclined to eat it like a mantis would its husband. What, James?"

The boy had gone white. "Sirius... remember that time? The time we hid the ten-pound block of chocolate before-you know," he said quickly, " _that_ thing happened? Doesn't the wrapper look a bit like that?" He indicated at the mess in Madam Pomfrey's hands.

They all exchanged a look. Peter looked like he was about to cry. Sirius leapt up and clutched at the matron's robes fearfully. "He's not going to die, right? I knew I hadn't misplaced it!"

Madam Pomfrey was ashen-faced. "Ten-pounds? TEN-POUNDS? Are you telling me Mr. Lupin consumed TEN POUNDS of chocolate on the night of the full moon?"

James sped toward the door, yelling, "I'll go owl Saint Mungo's!" He was halfway to the door when he froze. "Oh, right," he muttered dejectedly, trudging back to the group. "I forgot they're all racist."

Her heart sank as she looked at each of the boys. "I'm sorry," she said softly. "Why couldn't this happen at least until you graduate? There are enough bad things happening out in the wizarding world right now. I have half a mind not to tell you the truth, but I know you'll just figure it out anyway." She sighed, and came out with it. "There is no hope for Mr. Lupin. Seventy ounces is already enough to kill any member of the canidae family. Wolves and dogs have especially strong reactions against it, so if ten pounds is a hundred and sixty ounces- I'm terribly sorry, but chocolate just doesn't do it for wolves."


End file.
